This paper offers a longitudinal study grounded in the observation of an organization that was trapped in escalation of commitment to a failed strategy for a decade. Specifically, we will show how internal (organizational) and external (institutional) phenomena enabled the emergence of the strategy, fed the management team’s escalation of commitment despite internal opposition and institutional push-back and, eventually, constrained the management team to acknowledge failure and halt the escalation cycle. The case study reveals two mechanisms which played a central role in halting escalation and forcing a strategic reorientation: (1) expansion of organizational membership brings in new recruits who promote discrepant interpretations of ongoing courses of action thereby feeding political struggles inside the organization; (2) institutional field-level pressures provide political resources to internal opponents and enable them to force the management team to acknowledge failure and break the escalation cycle.
{"title":"Feeding and Breaking the Escalation of Commitment: The Role of Organizational Politics and Institutional Processes","authors":"Farah Kodeih, H. Bouchikhi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2686181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2686181","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers a longitudinal study grounded in the observation of an organization that was trapped in escalation of commitment to a failed strategy for a decade. Specifically, we will show how internal (organizational) and external (institutional) phenomena enabled the emergence of the strategy, fed the management team’s escalation of commitment despite internal opposition and institutional push-back and, eventually, constrained the management team to acknowledge failure and halt the escalation cycle. The case study reveals two mechanisms which played a central role in halting escalation and forcing a strategic reorientation: (1) expansion of organizational membership brings in new recruits who promote discrepant interpretations of ongoing courses of action thereby feeding political struggles inside the organization; (2) institutional field-level pressures provide political resources to internal opponents and enable them to force the management team to acknowledge failure and break the escalation cycle.","PeriodicalId":256207,"journal":{"name":"ORG: Dimensions of Power (Topic)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130316291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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